COMPARATIVE ASSESSMENT ON MODELING APPROACHES FOR THE SEISMIC RESPONSE OF RC SHEAR WALLS

Shear deformations may considerably affect the capacity and the failure mode of reinforced concrete members. Simplified beam-column models typically are not able to cap- ture this effect and usually are suitable only for members that exhibit a flexure-dominated re- sponse. Modeling approaches of increasing complexity for the simulation of reinforced concrete shear walls are compared in this work. More specifically, we compare the common fiber beam element, a simplified fiber beam element based on the Timoshenko theory that considers separately shear and bending deformations and a third Timoshenko beam element where a multidimensional concrete law is used. The various approaches are discussed and compared against experimental results. It is worth noting that experiments implemented for the comparison exhibit different failure modes, flexural as well as shear failure. The numeri- cal study provides an insight to the efficiency of the above methods in terms of computing de- mand, accuracy and ease of implementation.